The Gaming Experience

World of Pokémon Day #30 – Kanto Complete – The End of Our Adventure

So there we have it. After 30 days of travelling our adventure is over. We’re back in the United Kingdom and settling back into normality once more. Much sleep is still needed after our long day of travelling, but I do wonder how many days it’ll take before the urge to hit the road comes back. You never see Ash at home for more than a week it seems before he’s off to another region, I personally don’t think the guy can sit still. Better him than Red, who seems to prefer living alone in the mountains that going back home to Pallet Town. Their poor mothers, first dad left then their kids… I digress but we’ve had an amazing experience over the last month and it’s hard to believe it’s all come to an end so soon.
What amazes me most about the real life Kanto region was how diverse each place was we visited. From the sunny beaches of Shimoda and the green peaks of Hakone to the huge metropolis of Tokyo and the shimmering port of Yokohama, there’s a lot going on in such a small area of the country. Indeed there’s so much more to see in Japan (I mean we didn’t even go Kyoto and the southern island of Kyushu looks amazing!) While we want to return to see the places we missed the desire to see more of the country is still strong; the tropical south to the mountainous north, Japan seems to have all the climates you could want rolled into one country.
But what has touched me the most is the people we’ve met on our journey. We felt safe the entire time we were there, people were more than happy to point out where you wanted to go and some would even chase you down the street because you accidentally dropped something and they want to give it back to you. I suppose it comes from their more reserved, somewhat shy nature. Many of the people do not wish to offend in anyway so try their utmost to communicate with others. Not that they would offend otherwise but there is a real effort being made to make us foreigners feel welcome. I tried my best to speak some Japanese and I can only apologise for my limited success. We do wonder how different it’d be if one lived in the country and it’s huge cities, and we wonder more how different it might seem for female travellers, but for us we got along just fine the whole time we were out there.
So there we have it. The Kanto region of Pokémon Red and Blue, in real life. I thank everyone for taking the time to read any of these blogs and I hope that they’ve been an interesting read. There are more Pokèmon journeys to discover in the world but for now it’s back to everyday life.
But before I sign off, I wanted to explain why we wanted to make this trip happen in the first place. I wanted to do this trip because I always thought it’d be great to walk out the door one day and go on an adventure, just like young Pokémon Trainers do everyday in the games. The world to them doesn’t seem so scary, and they get to meet so many fascinating people and see many amazing places everyday. I didn’t know if it could be done in real life, the Pokémon World does seem like an ideal way of life rather than a realistic one. But we managed to go on an adventure of our own, it’s not impossible you just have to make it happen. I would often tell myself the contrary but now I feel different, like there are more possibilities out there than ever before. I wanted to do this trip to convince myself I could do anything if I wanted it enough, and it feels great to be sat here now knowing that we’ve been where we’ve been and done what we’ve done. So thank you for reading this blog for the past month, it means a lot to me that others are interested in this stuff too!
Regular updates will resume again soon, only for now I’m going to catch up on some sleep.